The battle is attested in a limited number of late Roman and early Medieval sources, having occurred around the year 448, in an unidentified location named Vicus Helena, somewhere in the Civitas Atrebatium, modern Artois.

Hic coeuntes claudebant angusta vias arcuque subactum vicum Helenam flumenque simul sub tramite longo artus suppositis trabibus transmiserat agger.

Fors ripae colle propinquo Barbaricus resonabat hymen, Scythicisque choreis nubebat flavo similars nove nupta marito.

Hos ergo, ut perhibent, stravit; crepitabat ad ictus cassis et oppositis hastarum verbera thorax arcebat squamis, donec conversa fugatus hostis terga dedit.

In The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Volume VI (1789), Edward Gibbon stated that 'both the name and the place are discovered by modern geographers at Lens'.

[7] Alexandre-Joseph-Hidulphe Vincent published an essay in 1840, arguing that neither Lens nor Hesdin (two popular candidates in his time) was plausible, but that Allaines near the Mont Saint-Quentin and the town of Péronne was the lost Vicus Helena.

[10] De Boone (1954) connected Sidonius' reference to a frozen Loire river to the exceptionally harsh winter of 442–3 mentioned by the Annals of Marcellinus Comes, but Lanting & van der Plicht (2010) rejected this, as Marcellinus doesn't mention any harsh winter in Gaul, and focused mostly on the Eastern Roman Empire; instead, the latter two focused on the military career of Majorian (Sidonius called him a iuvenis or 'young man' in 458, while he had left active military service before 454, suggesting a birth around 420), concluding 445–450 to be the most likely period for the battle.